War without end: the domestic economic fallout of empire

While the effects of the Bush doctrine on our relations in the world and our civil liberties at home have received widespread scrutiny, there has been relatively little attention paid to its effects on our domestic economy. This is surprising in light of Paul Kennedy's thesis that empires tend to overextend themselves militarily, depleting their revenue‐generating and productive capacities at home and making them vulnerable to decline in relation to nations whose economies are rising. This article brings together many threads of a discussion about the economic impacts of war that have been scattered across disciplines, buried in government documents and in the reports of government watchdogs groups, or are just beginning to emerge in the press, and suggests some areas for investigation that are being ignored. Far from “protecting our American way of life,” the garrison state the Bush administration is building may in fact be leading to our political and economic decline.     

French socialism and the fifth republic

The French Socialist Party's strategic acceptance of presidentialism in the Fifth Republic from 1971 created a relationship within the party which involved its discourse, its organisation, and the treatment of leadership within Socialism. The relationship between these elements changed after 1981 as a result of the party's winning the Presidency and attaining government. In the 1984–86 period, ‘modernisation’ began the adaptation of discourse to the new relationship. The 1987 party congress saw the partial adaptation of organisation. However, the problems encountered in the third area, leadership, after March 1986, demonstrated how problematic the triple relation organisation/discourse/leadership was, and how profound the effects of the Republic have been.     

The presidential party and the fifth republic

Until 1986 the prevailing interpretation of the French Fifth Republic was one of encroaching presidential domination; notwithstanding some welcome revisionism occasioned by ‘cohabitation’, presidentialism continues to permeate analysis of contemporary French politics. This article attempts a comparative assessment of the presidential party as it has functioned under the first four presidents of the French Fifth Republic: de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d'Estaing and Mitterrand. It is contended that each presidential party has shared certain attributes, resulting from systemic influences in France's semi‐presidential system; while retaining distinct characteristics derived from its identity as a particular type of party, and from the experience of a varying political context. The opportunities and constraints faced by successful presidential parties outweigh in importance their dissimilarites, inherited from their experience of different models of party organisation and ideology. No presidential party that has fallen from grace has managed to survive unscathed, nor to recover its position of former influence.     

Budgetary politics in the federal republic of Germany

The purpose of this article is to advocate a more careful approach towards the analysis of the factors that are decisive for the comparative evaluation of system performance and the reasons given for output variations. Using budgetary politics in the Federal Republic of Germany as an example, it is argued that the majority of the ‘Does politics matter?’ literature is oversimplifying reality by overlooking the institutional variable.     

Immigration,asylum and citizenship in Germany: The impact of unification and the Berlin republic

In recent years, there has been much debate over whether post‐unification Germany, often termed the ‘Berlin Republic’, represents a substantive change from the ‘Bonn Republic ‘, that is, West Germany. This article analyses Germany's immigration and citizenship policy against this background by examining various dimensions of immigration before and after unification. The article argues that both unification itself and Germany's changed international environment have resulted in far‐reaching changes in policy, which have forced a reappraisal of Germany's traditional self‐image as a ‘non‐immigration country’.     

War,the Presidency,and Legislative Voting Behavior

An extraordinary body of scholarship suggests that war, perhaps more than any other contributor, is responsible for the emergence of a distinctly modern presidency. Central to this argument is a belief that members of Congress predictably and reliably line up behind the president during times of war. Few scholars, however, have actually subjected this argument to quantitative investigation. This article does so. Estimating ideal points for members of Congress at the start and end of the most significant wars in the past century, we find consistent—albeit not uniform—evidence of a wartime effect. The outbreaks of both world wars and the post‐9/11 era—though not the Korean or Vietnam wars—coincided with discernible changes in member voting behavior that better reflected the ideological leanings of the presidents then in office. In the aftermath of all these wars, meanwhile, members shifted away from the sitting president’s ideological orientation. These findings are not confined to any single subset of policies, are robust to a wide variety of modeling specifications, and run contrary to scholarship that emphasizes ideological consistency in members’ voting behavior.     

War,pillage, and markets

Neoclassical economic theory has produced an extensive body of knowledge about market exchange based on cooperative relations: private property. This leads to an artificial dichotomy between cooperation and conflict though. It is best to view market exchange as lying along a continuum of conflict and cooperation. Conflict and cooperation are intertwined. From a game theoretic model of Hobbes' world, I show that a number of property rights structures are possible. Each is characterized as possessing varying degrees of conflict and cooperation. Finally, from a repeated game, I show how conflictual relations (mutual predation) may support more cooperative relations (private property). This new equilibrium is sub-game perfect.     

民国前期金融结构的变迁、原因及其影响

民国前二十六年是中国金融结构变迁的重要时期,战乱、投机、金融危机的爆发使得金融结构劣化,金融体系脆弱性加大,金融效率降低;而经济发展、制度变迁、技术进步推动的金融创新则改善了金融结构,有助于金融体系的稳定及其金融功能的完善.可见,政局稳定、金融创新及有效的金融监管是金融稳定发展的必要条件.     

The failure of the participatory democracy in the Czech republic

Following the breakdown of the Soviet system, the new East European elites faced the problem of defining and building democratic institutions. This problem was not a purely institutional one, however. During the transformation process, different conceptions of democracy appear and often become critical issues for political competition. Based on the Czech case, this article aims to understand how and why one particular conception of democracy becomes dominant during a process of regime change. Personified by the two ‘Vaclavs’ in the Czech political arena (Havel and Klaus), divergent perspectives on democracy exist in the Czech Republic, having concrete consequences for the practice of politics. These conceptions (referred to here as ‘participatory’ and ‘majoritarian') dramatically differ in their perception of the role of the citizen in a liberal democracy. This article identifies and describes these two different conceptions of democracy in the present and past Czech Republic. It explores the sociological conditions of their emergence in order to understand the failure of the participatory model of democracy with respect to the alternative, majoritarian, vision of democracy.     

British scientists,Lysenko and the Cold War

This study describes the impact of the Lysenko controversy in Britain. In particular, it delineates the way in which it became part of the means by which science and ideologies about scientific work were restructured during the forties and early fifties. As such the Lysenko controversy in Britain had, like its Soviet counterpart, social and political roots and effects.